The HEPI Blog aims to make brief, incisive contributions to the higher education policy landscape. It is circulated to our subscribers and published online. We welcome guest submissions, which should follow our Instructions for Blog Authors. Submissions should be sent to our Blog Editor, Josh Freeman, at [email protected].
HEPI’s report The Invisible Problem? Improving Students Mental Health, by Poppy Brown, highlighted that despite students having access to strong social networks and better employment prospects, survey data repeatedly shows that student are on average less happy and more anxious than the general population, including other young people. As such…
The role of a think tank is – in large part – to make potentially dry subjects interesting, engaging and impactful. But just sometimes, our job is the opposite. It is to try and help temper subjects that have become so divisive that it is hard to make reasonable progress.…
Have we come to the end of a golden age of higher education? That suggestion set the tone at the first of this year’s HEPI / AdvanceHE’s parliamentary seminars: ‘Boom or bust? How can institutions – and the regulator – best respond to the new market pressures in higher education?’…
A guest blog by Dr Scott Kelly, who lecturers at New York University London. He is the author of ‘The Myth of Mr Butskell: The Politics of British Economic Policy 1950 – 55’ and of two HEPI reports, Reforming BTECs; Applied general qualifications as a route to Higher Education and Raising productivity…
This guest blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Gervas Huxley of Bristol University and Mike Peacey of the New College of the Humanities. Parents of undergraduates frequently express surprise at how little time their children spend in lectures and classes. On open days it is common for both pupils and their parents to ask for information on contact hours. It was concerns of this kind that led us to use the Freedom…
Before Christmas, I tweeted that anyone who wants to write for HEPI should get in touch. >Have you got strong views on higher education?>Can you write in plain English?>Do you want to have an impact on policymakers? By the end of 2018, we will have published more papers than in…
A guest blog kindly contributed by Chris Ramsey, Headmaster of Whitgift School and chair of the Universities committee at HMC, a professional body for Headmasters and Headmistresses of Independent Schools. Whenever you review something big – a school curriculum or an admissions philosophy, or an Irish border – you always…
This guest blog has been kindly contributed by Dean Machin, who is the Strategic Policy Adviser at the University of Portsmouth. In 2015, he wrote a report for the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on data-sharing entitled ‘Data and public policy: trying to make social progress blindfolded’. Tomorrow, UCAS…
Last week, the first look at the annual data collected on staff at UK universities was published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). As well as the usual information on the profile of staff, new statistics are available on staff who are on zero-hour contracts and those who are hourly-paid,…
Over the past week, HEPI has been at the centre of a social media storm about academic selection. Last week, we published a report in our Occasional Paper series which looked at the question of how different school types fare in access to higher education, especially selective higher education, including…